


The Whispers Behind the Mirror

by Chibihaku



Series: Kalasin Lavellan [6]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternative Universe repository, F/M, Fic repository, I despise tagging my own work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-23 06:21:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4866323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibihaku/pseuds/Chibihaku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU repository for my Inquisitor and Iron Bull.</p>
<p>Even when the world changes, some things never will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Soul mates AU

Her name, when it comes in, is not a name but rather a series of numbers and for a long time she stares at her wrist thinking that she’s broken, that it’s broken.

—

His wrist spells something that is almost a word. Tama tells him firmly to ignore it, that the codes are nonsense anyway. There is no room for soulmates under the Qun.

—

She doesn’t let it stop her from dating, no, but it does give her pause when it comes to love. When Revas kisses her underneath the oak tree, she can’t help but think of the name that delicately wends up from the line of his thumb, a raised scar under her fingers, and the name is not hers. When he frowns against her lips at the gibberish code on her own wrist and pulls back to look at her with pity, she locks up her heart and decides she will never give it away.

 —

The first time, a Tamassran coaxes him through it, but he’s always been a fast learner, and has always enjoyed himself to abandon. He ignores the slightly worried look she gives his wrist (where his hand props him up near her head) as he buries himself inside her. 

—

Sex is easy, after all. Sex with no commitment, sleeping with shems that live in the villages near the camps, getting information for the Keeper, buying and bartering goods, finding inns, finding pretty faces, ignoring pretty names. Ignoring codes and lines that have no meaning. 

—

Obsession with the numbers leads to someone becoming Tal Vashoth. The closer the numbers are to becoming a word, the more likely they are to succumb. When he murders the Tal Vashoth that killed his friend, he doesn't look at their names. He just feels himself breaking and turns himself in.

—

Revas finds his name in the Spring before the mage war. She strikes an angry slash through the numbers on her wrist and tries not to be bitter when the wound heals clean and doesn’t leave a scar.

—

Afterwards, he forms the Chargers and gives them all new names, as is his custom. They’re all monikers that help him forget what they’re called, that help him ignore that all these people have names where strings of code could be. 

—

When the first mages come and attack the clan, she puts arrows clean through their skulls and daggers in their backs and is praised for her ruthlessness and her quiet determination to keeping the clan safe. She smiles sweetly, responds kindly, and tries not to think of Revas’ love, face down in the dirt, hands blacked and charred to the elbow where he was trapped in a fire mine that he stumbled into by mistake.

—

He is not like them. He is qunari. He is Ben Hassrath. He is  _not_  like them. His name is nonsense.

—

Names matter for nothing. Names are pain and love is injury. She is glad for the first time in her life that her name is nonsense.

—

The reports he sends back to Par Vollen get steadily more bleak as the Chargers march past craters left by magic and bodies left by swords. Most that have died are neither mage nor templar - they’re people, ordinary people, caught in the blast radius of a war that they didn’t want to be part of. Krem takes his gloves off to wipe sweat from his brow as he works to build a pyre (“It’s all we can give them, Chief.”) ad the sunlight catches around the band of looping script at his wrist. He averts his gaze before he can read the name.

—

She meets the woman without a name on her way to the conclave. She is content that there is someone else who is slightly like her. She is overjoyed at the prospect that soulmates aren’t necessary, commiserates with someone for the first time about the pitying looks and the startled gasps when people see the garbled string on her wrist. The woman dies in the explosion and she mourns with a fierceness that she didn’t think she was capable of. 

—

He reads the missive that comes to him that evening. He sends Krem on to the place called Haven (He’s human, after all, non-descript in a soldier’s uniform. He’s the most likely one to get through to whoever is in charge) and heads to the place marked on his map on the Storm Coast. There’s trepidation in his gut and a tingling in his wrist as he cleans his broadsword. He doesn’t like this, it smells of a trap.  

—

At least the thing in her hand gives her an excuse to wear gloves. They conveniently cover her wrist - as is proper fashion in the Orlesian courts. No one wishes to know (in a land of political marraige and suitors and mistresses) who the name on your wrist belongs to. And anything they find uncomfortable, they ignore.

—

The infamous herald is small and quick and bristles when someone tries to call her by that name. He decides he likes her near straight away, watches her flounder and then bolster and be unerringly polite until one day she cracks a joke he doesn’t expect. It’s terrible, he laughs. She rewards him with an embarrassed grin that looks so much more natural on her face than the tight, pained smile she wears most other times.

—

“Qunari don’t have names, not really.”

—

She looks at the string of code at her wrist and wonders for a moment, before she shakes her head and puts it out of her mind.

—

A monster magister comes. Haven burns. She falls. Cassandra finds her, but it's Bull who brings her home.

—

it takes her three days to wake up, and the first person she sees is Mother Giselle. The second person she sees is a qunari with one eye, and in her delirious state, she tries to sit up on the bed, reaching for a dagger. Her head swims and she passes out once more.

—

“Not bad, Boss. Nice ramparts. Could use some less snow, though.”

—

All lies have to end, even the very clever ones. He looks at his Chargers, then at his orders, and gets them all another drink. He hides more than he ever has before in his life, that night. Because he knows,  _he knows,_ if the qunari want to form an alliance with the Inquisition, some stories will have to fade, and that the Chargers are one of them. Disbanded in a final blaze of glory because a cover is only good for being a cover. Ben Hassrath are not Tal Vashoth, even as much as they behave it. He ignores the burning of his wrist when he passes the information onto the Inquisitor, ignores the voice in the back of his mind that says softly, steadily, that it was always going to come to this.

—

“His  _name_  is Iron Bull.”

—

“Tal Va-fucking-shoth.” And that says everything there is to say. She reaches out and lays her hand on his arm, takes a step closer and rests her forehead on his chest. She’s never been good at words, has always been better at actions, and he doesn’t pull away, even if he doesn’t move to get closer, either. There’s scars under her fingers, where they dance across his wrist. she moves her hand higher on his forearm to different scars with safer stories.

—

Later, he presses her hands above her head and asks her three times if this is what she wants. He needs to control something, anything, and she's  _willing_ , she’s gasping around him and burning above him, and he pulls her head back forcefully and buries his face in her neck, biting and grasping and hot and ready and  _there_. A name burns on his wrist, it’s not a coincidence that it’s hers.

—

She saddles up her halla the next morning and, ignoring the places on her body that hurt so sweetly, she  _rides and rides and rides_  because she  _looked._ She looked and she wasn’t ready for what she saw. She makes the beast kick and dance, makes it spin in a tight circle, makes it leap the series of small fences she’d set up in the lower courtyard a month before. she doesn’t stop until the creature is sweating and frothing at the mouth and her legs are cramping and her back is aching, then she slides off, throws herself into the mechanical motions of grooming and caring, gives the creature sugar cubes stolen from the kitchens in an apology for her manhandling. She moves then, moves to bathe, to head to the war room, her body a line of weary pain that she can no longer tell was from her dawn ride or the activities the night before. She doesn’t want this,  _she doesn’t want it._

_—_

“What did you  _do_ , Chief? No, don’t look at me like that - the Inquisitor snapped at Josephine." 

—

She comes to him that night. He smiles, takes her face in both his hands and kisses her on the mouth. "It’s just a scar.” He tells her, “It means nothing.” She wraps her hands about his wrist, trails her thumb along her name and almost believes him.

—

He knows the code on her wrist, but he chooses to ignore it. He’s Tal Vashoth and she’s a dalish elf and if there was a relationship ever doomed for a messy end it’s probably theirs. The idea of soulmates never sat right with him anyway. He’d much prefer a drink and a best friend, and if they fuck on the side all the better.

—

She agrees with him when he tells her this, when he outlines what he wants and she tells him the same. It’s easy and he's  _right_ , the name on his wrist means even less than the numbers on hers.

—

The ball is a strain. He sees it falling about her the moment she steps into the room, smile tightly in place as humans hurl slurs at her from behind beautifully gilded fans and kid-glove covered hands. He jokes lightly about the food to ease the worry from her eyes, watches her dance with the duchess and admires her grace from afar. She’s so good with words when she needs to be but, later, as she slips around an archer and buries her blade in the base of their neck, he can’t help but feel she’s even better with action.

—

When he offers to dance with her, she’s tired - so tired - and it’s all she can do not to ask to go home right there.

—

She has a fascination with the letters on his wrist, and she trails her fingers over them again and again - her name in a perfect replication of her handwriting. He’s always wondered how that worked, even as he grabs her hand and pushes her away, eyebrow coming up sternly, and she hastily tries to cover an impish smile. “If you can’t keep your hands still, Kadan, I will  _restrain them._ ”

—

The dragon is fierce and hot and terrifying. It roars at her and she bellows back, heart in her throat, adrenaline in her veins. It is anger and fire and death and she is  _equal_  to it, she will not fall, she will not burn, she will not yield. Behind her is a strength equally as fierce, equally as imposing, and he is  _laughing._

—

He drinks to a dragon’s death with her and as the alcohol glazes her eyes and her smile is wild and fierce and happy, he can’t quite bring himself to tell her that she’s beautiful. Instead, he calls her Kadan again and wonders at the way the name rolls off his tongue. He also wonders how long it will take her to ask him what it means.

—

She fingers the dragon’s tooth, split neatly down the middle and capped with obsidian. She’s not ready, she thinks, to admit to him that this might mean something, but she tucks the token away for the day when she is.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from a meme - Druxy.

See the girl over there? The one with the dark skin, the freckles and the broken nose?

They say that the master bought her for two silvers off a whore when she was just six years old. Pretty little thing she was even then. A fighter. They say she’d tried to escape the day before when she’d heard of the deal - tried to follow another elf out of the village, but the fruit-seller caught her stealing and sent her back home.

You know, just six and she killed a grown man when they came for her, crippled another. They put her in irons, tried to whip the fight out of her.

Would have made a good dalish in another life. Wild, cat-like. Quick and a fast study. Doesn’t say much, knows not to.

Alexius doesn’t call her a slave, refers to her as ‘servant’ when he can - but you know what she is. You can see it in the bands of scar tissue around her wrist, the quiet lie of her steps. She’s a better liar than the magister about other things, though.

—

After a month in the dungeons of Redcliffe, you ask her name. She smiles and says ‘Nataya’ and you think somehow that it’s wrong. But you notice also that there’s something there, simmering below the surface. It’s a muffled anger that she’s tried to smother beneath politeness and servitude. Could have made a good Charger, you think, might have clashed with Skinner. Krem would have adored her. 

She brings you food and water, and you wrap your hands around the bars of your cell and try to talk to her, joke with her. She doesn’t say much, maybe asks a few questions every now and again, won’t tell you anything about the castle, lets slip a few things about the world outside the gate.

It’s all shit, really. The demon army’s spreading faster than anyone can keep it in check. The Elder One chose his placement well, with Orlais crippled by the civil war and Ferelden just ten years out from the Blight. Tevinter started half-a-defense, the girl tells you, but the demons rolled in and turned half their own mages against them, and the rift’s getting bigger by the day with nothing to stop it. The qunari have taken Seheron with Tevinter too preoccupied trying to protect their own borders from the East to lay seige to the island.

You wonder how long that’ll last.

Rivain and Antiva have the water to their backs, but they’ve got ships enough that they’re holding out. They won’t last long after Tevinter falls, though, the young woman says. At the moment, the saving grace is that the army is focused elsewhere. 

—

At the four month mark, you start to feel the rocks growing in your blood.

It takes you by surprise when she’s bringing you food, and you collapse against the wall, clutching at your chest a moment. She doesn’t drop the bowl, she’s too well-trained for that, but she puts the food on the ground and runs to the bars, hands wrapping around them, uncertain of how she can help. 

The feeling passes, and you smile in what you hope is a reassuring manner, even as “what the fuck was that?” simmers just under your voice. She doesn’t smile back and that should have been your first clue.

It should have been your first damn  _clue._

The dizziness passes, and she gives you food and water as usual, laughs at your jokes and flicks a half-hearted come-on your way to get you to grin. You know she doesn’t mean it. You still flirt back. 

—

Six months, and the crystals in your blood are grating against your veins near constantly. She soothes you with a cool cloth when she can, still brings you food, still brings you news. You grab her one day as she goes to leave, your whole hand fits easily about her wrist. She turns and looks down at it, looks up at you.

There’s no fear in her eyes. 

She steps back to the cage, there’s a breath shared between you.

Then someone coughs just outside the room, and you let her go and she tucks your bowl under her arm and her hair behind her ears and leaves the dungeon a little too quickly.

The next time you see her, she only brings food, and doesn’t say a word to you. 

—

Ten months in, and now the walls are glowing red, and there’s faint lines of blacklight that float across your vision. You’ve taken to singing to pass the time, managed to get her to join in once, and her voice is just as musical as you think it should be. She laughs and hums and somehow the brief few minutes once a day when she comes to you is how you break up the time between one day and the next. 

You look forward to making her smile, aware that it’s getting harder with every passing day to do so. There’s a secret hovering in her eyes, she flinches at the harsh buzz that’s started to form in your voice. 

Ten months in and she still hasn’t got the slightest bit of red lyrium in her, on her, growing out of her.

You don’t ask her about it, because you’ve got a feeling you know why it is, and you prefer the illusion that she’s on your side.

—

“It was in the water.” She says, on the anniversary of your dungeon stay, when the Inquisitor you thought was dead comes and springs you out of prison. 

“It was in the water.” She sighs ruefully, when you find her, in the kitchens, next to the jars of red lyrium dust that she’s been lacing your food with.

“I’m - “

You don’t let her finish the sentence before you kill her.


End file.
